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  • Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America by Gowan Dawson
  • Hsiang-Fu Huang (bio)
Gowan Dawson, Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. viii + 480 pp. $50.00 hardcover.

It is not difficult to find metaphors for scientific research as being parallel to crime investigation, whether in true or fictional stories. A classic example is Sherlock Holmes, the great detective in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, whose trademarks include extensive knowledge of criminology and methodical deduction. To solve the mysteries of nature or the human world, in Doyle's words (through Holmes), scientists and detectives both require feats of insight to "correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone" (qtd. 14). The heroic scientist to whom Doyle refers is French anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Cuvier's law of correlation deeply influenced his contemporaries' thoughts on the representation of science. Gowan Dawson's Show Me the Bone attempts to explain how Cuvier's axiom triumphed and declined in the mid-nineteenth century and how its residue continued to thrive afterward outside the scientific realm.

Cuvier was an innovative pioneer of paleontology aiming to make the discipline as reasonable as physical sciences. Cuvier's law of correlation, the method to "infer the size, appearance, and even life habits of animals from just a single part of their anatomy" (3), was highly admired in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Cuvier invoked the story of Zadig, the wise man who is able to identify the track of the king's escaped horse in Voltaire's eponymous fiction, to describe the feat of his method. Despite the law's later challenge and eventual overthrow, the representation of the law of correlation had become deeply rooted in literature and popular culture. It became a clichéd image of scientists for representing their mental powers.

The transfer of the Cuvierian axiom from the specialist context to the cultural realm was actually a two-way exchange. Cuvier referred to the feat of his method as that of the fictional character Zadig; the popularity of Cuvierian correlation later inspired the creation of Sherlock Holmes. As Dawson remarks, the "Zadig-like process of [End Page 211] backward reasoning . . . was conflated with Cuvier's conviction that the paleontological accomplishments . . . were attributed to his understanding of rational laws" (362). This observation brings out the main thesis that "literary factors helped shape perceptions of the law of correlation, among practitioners as much as the public, and often . . . diverged from the opinions of the elite scientific community" (13).

The book consists of four thematic parts in chronological order. The first part, chapters 1 and 2, narrates the arrival of the law of correlation in Cuvier's lifetime, in the early nineteenth century. Here Dawson stresses the circulation of Cuvierian correlation outside France, particularly in the English-speaking world. Despite the French Revolutionary War and later Napoleonic blockade of Britain, news of Cuvier's fossil research still crossed the Channel via commercial science and literary periodicals. British enthusiasm for Cuvier's science was partly because his understanding of animal structure suited the picture of harmonic mechanisms by divine design. Although Cuvier himself was ambivalently silent with regard to religion, the law of correlation became "increasingly central to the Anglican tradition of natural theology" (6). On the other hand, Cuvier's organic laws were amenable to divergent interpretations: Whig radicals or militant materialists could also find backup from his science. Cuvierian correlation also reached the other side of the Atlantic via a large number of reprinted British books and periodicals. Cuvier's Swiss protégé, Louis Agassiz (1807-73), who later immigrated to the United States, was instrumental in consolidating Cuvierian correlation in America.

The second part of the book focuses on the popularization of Cuvierian correlation in Britain during the 1840s and 1850s. English zoologist Richard Owen (1804-92) is the key figure in this part: each chapter explores one case of Owen's efforts to promote Cuvierian correlation. Chapter 3 deals with the reconstruction of the Dinornis, a.k.a. the giant moa, an extinct genus of flightless birds...

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